Notifications system is among one of the best and most important upgrades we have seen with iOS 5. Some people would say that Apple has a lot to thank for different ideas to the jailbreak community, as many ideas were tested in the real world before Apple released it with their official apps. iOS 5 Notification Center features a pull down menu that is now place where all notifications are located. This new system is exceedingly intuitive but has a great potential for further improvements via serious of small but interesting tweaks like the one we will explore next.
WeeKillBackground is a new tweak within Cydia app store and it attempts to improve things for jailbreak users even further. This tweak when activated will immediately terminate all apps running in the background therefore freeing your iPhone resources for more important tasks or simply to conserve some energy. This will be especially important to newbies which hoard apps and use them like they have infinite resources on their iOS devices. If you tend to launch many different apps every day there are great chances your iPhone will run many useless tasks in the background. This will slow down your iPhone considerably and it will also consume the energy stored in your iPhone battery in a short time.
You wont get any new icon on your home screen after you install this handy tweak. You can configure the tweak in the usual way, by navigating to the Settings app. When installed you can use it simply by opening Notification Center and tapping on “Tap to kill apps” option. Keep in mind that this is a jailbreak tweak only so you will have to jailbreak your iOS 5 iPhone before you can use it. To jailbreak your device we recommend RedSn0w for Mac and Windows. Please feel free to use guides and manuals you can find in our blog archives.
Sometimes we just cant stop wandering, where do Cydia app developers get such inspiration for their unexpected improvements like Magnifier for Safari? Certainly iPhone screens are not exactly the best platform for reading text documents but this tweak is able to save the day and enable you read your important stuff on the iPhone. Did you ever strained your eyes with reading a small text on some website? Here is a solution for you if you have a jailbroken iPhone. Magnifier For Safari will resize the small fonts in a breeze and enable you to scroll quickly and efficiently through your reading text.
This tweak can be found in Cydia only meaning that you have to jailbreak your iPhone before you can enjoy it. You can jailbreak your device by using some available jailbreak tools like Sn0wbreeze, RedSn0w or Jailbreak Me. For instructions on how to use this apps please check our blog archive. It is simple, legal and fully reversible. If you find jailbreaking unsatisfying, which is exceedingly rare just restore your iPhone and you have a stock iPhone again.
After you download and install Magnifier For Safari, you will see a new button appearing in your browser: ‘Adjust Font size’. When you tap on the icon it will launch a slide bar where you can optimize the font size of the page you are reading at the moment. Basically the whole process is quite easy and straightforward. If you are often reading large text based websites on your iPhone Magnifier For Safari is just what you need. You can purchase this handy tweak for $0.99 in Cydia app store.
Every day we are witnessing some new ingenious jailbreak tweak and app. Here is another small but potentially very useful tweak for your device. If you ever heard about Google’s audio recognition services you will know it can convert your speech into text. So now we have a new jailbreak tweak which does something similar for your jailbroken iPhone. Voice Keys is available for your device in the always useful Big Boss repository. When you install it you will be able to convert your spoken words and sentences into text for yor SMS or email. The conversion isn’t done by this tweak, instead it captures your audio and then uses Google’s own services for this. As always you should keep your voice slow and clear if you want to get a decent result with this.
At the beginning you will get strange results but after some time your experiences will approve as the app will adjust to your voice. This wont be helpful if you are in hurry and need to get something written down fast, but if you have plenty of time you could easily make a good use of this particular tweak. It works for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. You can download it for free if you have Cydia installed, just make sure that you add Big Boss repo to your iPhone sources list. It comes as a free download and it is a great excuse for trying something new with your iPhone.
If you ever wanted to adjust and customize icons on your home screen including making them transparent or switching off icons labels, here is how to achieve that. As always ,this tweak is available only for jailbreak users, so hurry up and jailbreak your iPhone as it is safe, legal and fully reversible process. You can jailbreak all iPhone and iPad versions except iPad 2 with RedSnow, PwnageTools, Sn0wBreeze or Jailbreak Me 3.0.
Previously you could also achieve this effect but the solution was a bit more complex than what Alphacon does. After you download and install Alphacon with Cydia, you wont see nay new icon appearing on your home screen but you will be able to adjust your settings within the settings app. You can easily choose which level of transparency you would like to have, or whether you want to see icon names or not. Hurry up and get Alphacon, as it is currently available as a free download. As always we would like to hear your comments, so leave them in the comments section bellow if you already tried out this handy little jailbreak tweak.
Tweak Week is an event organized and inspired by Rayan Petrich, a famous Canadian iOS app developer and it is an event where during every day of week some well known app developer releases one open sourced iOS app. This was the ocassion when Elias Limneos, himself an Greek iPhone dev has released a cool new tweak which could become quite popular in short time. This original little tweak aims to do something every iPhone owner wishes from time to time: if you add this tweak you will be finally able to rearrange your iPhone Status Bar the way you prefer it.
Here is a demo of this nice new tweak.
As you saw in the demo you can easily rearrange the icons in your Status Bar with a few quick moves of your fingertips. If you couple this tweak with lets say CleanStatus tweak, you can clean up and organize your Status Bar as efficiently and simply as you alwyas wanted to. To download the tweak you will need to jailbreak your iPhone. All iPhone models can be jailbroken currently with PwnageTool or RedSn0w for Mac. On windows PC you can use such tools as Sn0wBreeze or RedSn0w for windows.
After you get this tweak through Cydia, you can immediately start organizing your Status Bar. Do not forget to add this Cydia repo to the list of your sources: http://rpetri.ch/repo Note: this tweak is free, so thank you to Ryan Petrich and Elias Limneos!
Do you like this tweak? Are you willing to try it out for yourself? If yes, please share your experience! We think its awesome, do you agree?
Many Cydia tweaks are well just tweaks. The are not full scale apps with many unwanted complicated options for installing and setting up. They are simple tools specially made for simple tasks. Here is one which is breathlessly simple yet potentially quite useful.
The single goal of Full Charge Alert is only protect your battery. If you are like most of us you will plugin your iPhone to recharge it and then you’ll practically forget about it until you need to use it again. This practice doesn’t reflect well on your iPhone battery life. So to prevent this and enlarge the life time of your iPhone’s battery Full Charge Alert will notify you with one of 40 available alarms, whenever your iPhone is fully charged. The tweak is available only in Cydia App Store and you can download it in exchange for $1.25. When you get it and install it, all you have to do is to go to Settings and decide which alarms sounds best to you. You can easily turn the tweak on and off and you can also choose to receive a notification or vibration instead of sound alarm.
This simple tweak is like many others, not spectacular on its own but combined with a bunch of other simple tweaks it can greatly improve your iOS user experience. This alone makes it worthwhile to jailbreak your iPhone in our experience. If you need help with jailbreaking you can find latest tools and guides for jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad in our blog archives.
Most of us would ask why should anyone bother themselves with such an idea, but on the other hand why not? If nothing else you could learn a thing or two especially if you are a novice in the iOS world. So here is the trick.
There is a script which can help you to use iPad apps on your iPhone or even iPod. It will also enable you to transfer the apps to your iPhone through the Wi-Fi connection. Thiw is not a novel project as it has been done earlier. The script will only change file permissions ( change them to 775) and then you only have to move the app to / Applications folder on your iPhone. Note: you can do this manually if you know enough tricks. But if you would like to test this but don’t know too much about iOS you can follow these simple steps:
1. Download the script http://chickenjoeactinggroup.com/dev/isp/iTelePad2Pod.zip
2 Unzip the zipped file.
3.Copy the extracted folder to /Applications on your Mac computer.
4. open the folder named iTelePad 2 Pod and start the app with the same name.
5. Follow the simple on screen instructions.
You can see the demo of the app on this Youtube video:
Here is another tip to improve your iPhone experience. This time I’ll try to explain how to use the iPhones voice control more efficiently and with better results.
Usually iPhone voice control works quite good from the start, but in some cases it still can fail. For example if you try to call someone who has a short contact name like Mom or John the voice recognition software will often misunderstand you. But you can avoid this by using a simple trick explained bellow.
If you often dial some of your contacts but have problems doing it with voice control here is what to do. Open the contact which you want to call, tap on Edit option which is positioned in the top right side of the display, and the New Field option on the bottom. Now just add a nickname in the field. You can now use that nickname to call the contact. So instead of using John you can use JohnBurrows as this will be much easier for the voice control to recognise.
The point is that monosyllabic names are difficult to recognise whether more complex words can be easier recognised. So it is simple: to improve the voice recognition just add a nickname to the contact which causes you problems. Easy and simple solution for an everyday problem.
Let us know did you use this trick and did it help you. Do you know some other useful tip? Let us know in the comments section bellow.
We have just recently stumbled on a really interesting app named: Display Recorder. This app as its name suggests can capture in the video format your iPhone screen. This is same like in regular screen casting but now it is available on your iPhone with this app.
This comes great if you want to record your game results or test some new app and when you want to share it with your friends you can easily upload it to Youtube from the app directly. The app misses some features: it doesn’t record sound and you cant play recorded video in the app. To get the app you must jailbreak first and find it in Cydia. IT comes with the price tag of $4.99
To use the app, fire it up and tap on the plus sign to record a new screencast. When you tap it there will appear a small pop up notifying you about the recording and then you can press on Record if you want to start recording. When you want to stop recording just press the power button. When you finish you will see the recording appearing in the list which you will see whenever you start the app. You can upload it from there to your Youtube account or you can move it directly to your computer.
You can adjust the settings of the app when you start it and go to Settings option. Various adjustable settings include:
Frame rate: you can record on 8fps up to 20 fps
Video quality level: low , medium or high
Tap size
Youtube account
Activation method
Tap size, etc.
We have noticed that Display Recorder crashes sometimes and sometimes it just wont stop recording so it still feels somewhat buggy. Another mayor critique is that it lacks sound recording. Hopefully they will improve this in next version of the app. However this app does what it should do, you can easily record your iPhone screen and share it online with your friends.
Your iPhone is a perfect tool for all your tasks which need to be done while you are doing something or getting from place to place. In such situation you will often need to edit some writing, perhaps an email or short note. You will in many cases need to quickly copy and past a word or sentence. This can sometimes be confusing to new iPhone users. Most iPhone users will tap twice on the selected word and then drag the highlighted area to include whole paragraph which needs to be copied.
Although this is something most users do in such situation there is even an easier way.
If you want to copy a whole paragraph, just use two fingers and swipe the text you need to copy somewhere. Your text will become selected and you can now copy it.
There is also a third way, which is to tap four times on the paragraph to choose it. You can choose whichever method you like, it will get you the same result.
Do you have some interesting iPhone tips which could be useful to our readers?
